FounderFuel shines with nine Startups on inaugural Demo Day
Today Montreal's FounderFuel officially unveiled the nine graduating teams from their first cohort at their Demo Day.
The teams pitched to a full house at Monument National that included 120+ investors from Canada and the US as well as over 400 people from the local startup community.
Leading off the batting order was web monitoring tool BlameStella. BlameStella co-founder Delano Mandelbaum explained that while web monitoring is a crowded space, it is ultimately broken and there is a huge unserved market for their easy-to-integrate product.
In the two-hole was Editola co-founder Mathieu Simard. Editola wants to transform the way you explore and read the news by using the community to build the most accurate view of every news story, all in a single-page.
Up third was university inspired OOHLALA. Co-founder Daniel Jameel described their mobile app that helps students take control of their college life - finding parties, people and cheap pizza on campus. OOHLALA was signed up 40 student organizations to date and is looking to raise $700K of which $400K is already committed by a strategic partner.
Cleanup Hitter Playerize didn't disappoint. Co-founder Jeff Magnusson demonstrated actual hockey stick revenue growth for their platform that delivers player installs for social and mobile games from diverse channels at "huge scale". Rho Ventures Jeff Grammar introduced Playerize and announced that they've closed a $250k seed round with money from Rho, Real Ventures and a handful of local angels.
In the heart of the order in the #5 and #6 spots were PlayTakesAll and Seevibes respectively.
PlayerTakesAll is a viral campaign & referral management platform that enables advertisers to extend the reach of their marketing efforts. According to co-founder Phil McKegney PlayerTakesAll helps clients leverage traffic, engage social networks and increase the effiecieny of their marketing campaigns by up to 50% while rewarding site visitors.
Seevibes' Laurent Maisonnave explained that while TV is the most popular topic across Facebook and Twitter, there is no way to measure audience engagement on social networks. Seevibes is a Social Media TV Rating platform that measures TV show engagement across a number of social media channels and packages that data for the advertising industry.
FounderFuel Mentor Harley Finkelstein introduced Vuru's Yoseph West to present 7th. West explained that Vuru makes sense of stocks by taking complex financial statements and distilling them down into clear, transparent reports that show investors the fundamentals that matter.
Wavo.me is a social music player. Co-founder Conor Clarke opened his pitch by explaining that the iTunes user interface hasn't changed significantly in ten years and even the newest player in space, Spotify, hasn't done much more to innovate. Clarke's music player stresses finding, keeping, and sharing music by leveraging the YouTube platform to collect, manage and play music and videos.
Up last was Willet's Fraser Harris. According to Harris, traffic from social networks converts half as well on e-commerce sites as traffic from Google. Willet's goal is to increase conversion rates of social traffic and become the 2nd e-commerce funnel behind Google. Willet is the missing step from social browsing into shopping, and converts the mindsets of people without any intent to buy into paying customers.
Applications for the FounderFuel's second cohort, scheduled to start on February 20th of next year, can be submitted to the FounderFuel website until January 7th.
Kudos to Real Ventures for pulling off a great event and what looks like an excellent inaugural cohort.
